Buon Giorno

BUON GIORNO
By
Stephen M. Fragale

How can it possibly get any better than this? I am sitting in a city park in Florence, Italy. If I was back home in Amerika I would be alone, everyone would be home watching the evening news, or the Simpsons, or Friends, MTV, Survivor, American Idol, CNN at best. Here people are sitting in a park, a bar, a café, or just walking the crooked streets right out of a drawing from Escher. I love all the bicycles here as well. I think of the song bicycle by Queen and start humming it. The Italians just shake their head at this American fool. Anyway, the bicycles here arent those fancy mountain bikes or cool bikes with ten different speeds and so many new gadgets that its harder than driving a car. Nope. They are just simple cool hip black bikes held over from the 50s. The kind of bike Henry Miller rode in Paris before the War, the kind with the straight handlebars. Im perplexed as to what I need more right nowone of those bicycles or a woman? Not just any woman will do. She has to be tall with a sexy Italian accent and long branches and green shady leafs.
There is locust humming in my head. There is a new silver beetle Bug driving down the street. What can you do with all this information? It cant really mean anything, can it? All the girls here have cell phones like back in America. But they chatter away in Italian. I wish I knew what they were saying.

I half think about going back to the wine bar I was at earlier where I had two great glasses of wine and a margarita pizza and stared furtively at this Italian girl with dark crazy curly hair. I could go back and wait for her. Surely she would return. More than once our eyes connected in the dim light. The last time I stared at her she walked by on her way out of the restaurant and had this smile as if to say yes I know your smiling at me and yes I am smiling too but I am not going to look directly at you and let you know that I know your smiling at me, I could just be smiling at anyone and maybe I always smile this way when I have had too much good Italian wine. As she walked away out the door I should have said, buon giorno.